Earlier in the year I had a bit of a grumble on the blog about the apparent fascination with Twitter after a report was released into social media usage in the UK National Health Service.
Despite the tremendous advances in areas such as telehealth, communities of support and practice, and even MOOCs, the report focused solely on the use of Twitter by healthcare providers.
I do like Twitter (really), but of all of the things that are useful to hospitals (and patients), I would say that is relatively low down the list.
Facebook is arguably even lower down, and yet it does at least appear to provide a useful signaling function.
I wrote a few years ago about a study that explored whether there was any parallel between the number of likes a hospital received on Facebook, and the happiness of patients.
The results were intriguing. They found that every 93 extra likes correlated with a 1% fall in the mortality rate. The researchers drew the conclusion that lower mortality rates equal higher patient satisfaction, which manifests itself in a higher number of likes on Facebook.
Whilst that was a proxy for the quality of a hospital, a more recent study set out to explore where explicit ratings provide an accurate reflection of the actual merits of that facility.
The study found that there was a strong correlation between the 5-star rating a hospital gets on Facebook and their performance in more widely-used metrics.
“We found that the hospitals in which patients were less likely to have unplanned readmissions within the 30 days after discharge had higher Facebook ratings than were those with higher readmission rates,” the authors say. “Since user-generated social media feedback appears to be reflective of patient outcomes, hospitals and health care leaders should not underestimate social media’s value in developing quality improvement programs.”
Facebook versus official figures
The researchers analyzed data on 30 day readmission rates from over 4,800 hospitals from the Hospital Compare website.
It emerged that roughly 80 percent of the hospitals had ratings in line with the national average, whilst 7 percent were quite a bit lower and 8 percent quite a bit higher.
On the surface, there was no tangible difference between the hospitals in the strong performing and low performing groups. They had similar size, similar number of admissions, expenses and so on.
Alas, it emerged that the hospitals with low-readmission rates were more likely to be active on Facebook (93 percent vs 82 percent). Just as in the previous study, a one star increase in their average rating on Facebook corresponded to a five-fold increase in the likelihood that re-admission rates would be low.
“While we can’t say conclusively that social media ratings are fully representative of the actual quality of care, this research adds support to the idea that social media has quantitative value in assessing the areas of patient satisfaction – something we are hoping to study next – and other quality outcomes,” the authors say.
Is it a sign that hospital managers need to become more active on Facebook? I’m far from convinced, and suspect there are many better uses of their time. Nevertheless, it is grist for the mill.
It's interesting, but I'd be really reluctant to rely on the veracity of Facebook for anything at all. There must be more reliable 'social' metrics to measure a hospital by surely?
Interesting. I wonder if it's something to do with the platform or just any group of people could come to the same conclusion?
Yes, good question Wayne. I would imagine so, as there can't be anything particularly unique to Facebook as a platform.
"The researchers drew the conclusion that lower mortality rates equal higher patient satisfaction, which manifests itself in a higher number of likes on Facebook."
Woah! Stop right there!!! 🙂 That sounds to me like an outrageous conclusion to draw. To make the leap from higher patient satisfaction being reflected by a higher number of likes on Facebook seems ridiculous. I take it we're talking about a like of a page here, as opposed to a like of a post on a page. But just because someone 'likes' a page doesn't mean to say they actually like it – it means they follow it. The converse could in fact be true – they might actually follow it because they dislike it. Let's say a hospital was underperforming – people might 'like' the page because they are concerned about what is going on there and want to be kept updated with any news.
Or to put it another way, Adi, you (or other Evertonians) might 'like' the Liverpool FC page because you want to follow what they're up to – or even goad their supporters 😉 – yet I'm pretty sure you don't like them. 😉
I wouldn't be seen dead liking the Liverpool page mate 🙂
You get my point… 😉 I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be the first Evertonian to do so. Hell, some of them even end up playing for them. 🙂
Ha, yes, I do, and there has been a fair bit of discussion around the suitability of social media data for research purposes, as it's increasingly common (Twitter for instance give up their data for this end). I'm not a fan of Facebook at the best of times, so I'd certainly want to see comparisons made with other healthcare related social media before drawing too many conclusions from this.
Might just be that patients and their families who had successful outcomes were more likely to "like" the hospital's page on Facebook, which could be the case. Either that or those hospitals with lower readmissions had higher budgets for their social media teams to work with. Interesting article either way!
I might be wrong here, but I don't see this as ever intending to be a cast iron metric to determine the quality of a hospital, but rather a near enough proxy that is a darn sight cheaper than how these things are usually measured.
If it can do that, then that's good enough for me.